Chapter 7 - The Trial in the Shadows
I pressed the button on the speaker.
Caleb’s voice filled the vaulted banquet hall, loud, resonant, and undeniable: "My father would rather burn this city to the ground than let a parasite like you poison our family. I'm telling him tonight."
Then came the sound of rain. The sound of crunching metal. And then, Marcus’s voice from that fateful night, captured on Clara’s paramedic bodycam audio: "Let the boy bleed out. If he dies here, the old man will fall apart within a year, and the empire is ours."
A collective gasp swept through the room. Four of the oldest capos—men who had known Caleb since he was a boy learning to ride a bicycle on the estate grounds—stood up so violently their heavy wooden chairs crashed against the floorboards.
"What is this madness?" Marcus screamed, his voice cracking into panic as he backed away from the table. "This is an AI fake! A frame job by rival families! Vincent is senile! He’s trying to purge us to hold onto power!"
"Check your phones," Sal announced from the doorway, holding up a military-grade tablet.
Simultaneously, twenty-four smartphones chimed across the table. On every screen appeared the verified bank records from the Swiss accounts, the forensic vehicle reports showing the sliced brake lines, and the signed affidavit from Clara Vance, backed by police department corruption files.
Marcus realized within five seconds that the lie was dead. The wolves around the table were no longer looking at their new leader; they were looking at a rabid dog that had slaughtered their own blood.
With a feral roar, Marcus drew his concealed Glock from his shoulder holster, aiming straight at my chest. "If I'm going down, you old bastard, you're coming with me!"
He pulled the trigger.
Click.
The firing pin struck empty air. Marcus’s eyes bulged in pure terror as he pulled the trigger again and again. Click. Click. Click.
"You should know better than anyone, Marcus," I said, rising from my chair without the slightest hint of a limp, tossing the ivory cane onto the table. "Before any sit-down in this house, Sal checks every weapon brought across the threshold. Your personal armorer was Caleb’s godfather. Did you really think his loyalty could be purchased with dirty port money?"
The two capos standing behind Marcus grabbed his arms, twisting them behind his back with bone-snapping force, driving him down to his knees before me. The pinstripe suit tore against the hardwood. The diamond ring clattered across the floor.
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"Vincent! Please!" Marcus begged, tears of cowardice finally streaming down his cheeks. "We were brothers! Caleb was reckless! He was going to destroy everything we built! I did it for the family! For the family!"
"Caleb was the family," I whispered, stepping down the riser until I stood directly over him. "And you left him to die in the rain."
